Serif – Craft Artist Platinum review

The latest version of Serif’s all-singing, all-dancing craft program comes complete with four CDs’ worth of templates and content, themed as weddings, general greeting cards, baby photos and scrapbooks.

This gives you all you need to create thousands of unusual projects that go way beyond cards, invitations and posters and allows you to design scrapbooks, table decorations, gift bags and boxes, tags, labels, cake toppers, cupcake wrappers, confetti cones and stands, bunting and much more.

Qulaity contentThe quality of Craft Artist Platinum’s templates is excellent. Decorations (things like buttons, borders, stitching, glitter, frames and fabrics) are first-class, and the tools that allow you to apply them intuitive and easy to master. Because all of the elements are editable, you can re-jig the out-of-the-box templates easily enough to produce something more personal by adding your own photos or bits of artwork.

The software comes with a built-in photo editing program that’s capable enough, and literally thousands of different effects, brushes, stitches, backgrounds, fills and frames for you to apply – as well as funky tools such as the glitter brush and pattern hole punch, which do a fine job of re-creating ‘classic’ craft effects in the digital world.

Craft Artist Platinum also makes good use of layers, enabling you to stack items on top of each other to create realistic-looking scrapbooks, 3D-style cards and other unusual projects. Invest in some good-quality paper and card, and you’ll be impressed at the results you can achieve using the program. Alternatively, you can e-mail projects to friends or save them as PDFs.

A generous collection of templates and content that will allow you to produce a wide range of traditional (and more unusual) crafts and paper/card projects to a very high standard. A wide range of templates make it easy to get going straight away, while the program's superb editing features allow you to tweak standard content till the cows come home.